Advances in photovoltaic technology, which are used to make solar panels, have helped solar energy gain mass appeal among those wishing to reduce their carbon footprint and decrease their monthly energy costs. However, the panels are typically fabricated manually, which is a time-consuming and error-prone process that makes it costly to mass-produce reliable solar panels.
Solar panels typically include one or more strings of complete photovoltaic structures. Adjacent photovoltaic structures in a string may overlap one another in a cascading arrangement. For example, continuous strings of photovoltaic structures that form a solar panel are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/510,008, filed Oct. 8, 2014 and entitled “Module Fabrication of Solar Cells with Low Resistivity Electrodes,” the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. Producing solar panels with a cascaded cell arrangement can reduce the resistance due to inter-connections between the strips, and can increase the number of photovoltaic structures that can fit into a solar panel.
One method of making such a panel includes sequentially connecting the busbars of adjacent cells and combining them. One type of panel (as described in the above-noted patent application) includes a series of cascaded strips created by dividing complete photovoltaic structures into strips, and then cascading the strips to form one or more strings. Moreover, multiple individual strings are interconnected, assembled, and packaged together to form a solar panel. When strings are packaged into a panel, in addition to the energy conversion efficiency of each individual strip, the ways strings are electrically interconnected within a solar panel also determine the total amount of energy that can be extracted from each panel. It has been shown that solar panels based on parallelly connected cascaded strings provide several advantages, including but not limited to: reduced shading, enablement of bifacial operation, and reduced internal resistance. However, conventional approaches for inter-string connections often require cumbersome wirings, which only complicate the panel manufacturing process but can also lead to extra shading.